Growing towards God as an Introvert

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Two Kingdoms

Jesus answered, “My Kingdom is not of this world. If my Kingdom were of this world, then my servants would fight, that I wouldn’t be delivered to the Jews. But now my Kingdom is not from here.”–John 18:36

Jesus states fairly plainly here that his Kingdom isn’t of our world. To me, like he also states in other parts of the gospels, Jesus is the king of a spiritual kingdom. Paul also reiterates this and our status therein.

For the past two thousand years, we have seen man fighting physically and/or politically to establish a physical kingdom for Jesus. He states that his servants would only fight if his kingdom was of this world, but it isn’t. If his servants then didn’t fight, why do we continue to struggle against those people we could be reaching out to instead? It seems we want try to control people through politics and religion so they will be “encouraged” into a relationship with Jesus.

Our example is Christ Jesus. Sure, we may be flailing and imperfect, but we strive to be more. Being led to believe “this is the way it is and has always been” binds us to conformity in which we continue to attempt building a physical kingdom that hasn’t done a very good job of representing Jesus as he is presented in the gospels. Jesus states that he has already brought the Kingdom, all we have to do is enter in through him. Then, we can help others to see this spiritual kingdom. Our human methods of “kingdom building” may seem like a noble pursuit, but have only pushed those Jesus reached further away from us reaching them.